https://medium.com/@mrjamiemoffat/patience-understanding-acceptance-appreciation-2c0005b9b9c?source=friends_link&sk=e74848021d73411305c2c4a20b467487
Patience – a prerequisite for understanding.ย Even if you are incredibly quick to comprehend things, patience is still a firm requirement for dealing with people.ย It takes repeated displays of patience when interacting to help the people you are speaking with attain a comfort level sufficient for coming out of their shell, and revealing innermost personal truths about themselves openly.ย Patience in this sense becomes an absence of judgment and criticisms as people unravel themselves for you, a state maintained in pursuit of the next step, understanding.ย ย This extends beyond people to cover basically all forms of interaction, both with others and ourselves. In terms of understanding situations, patience becomes a requirement for quieting, or working past, our immediate perceived needs and responses, in order to get past our own desired role or involvement and to develop a view of the situation from a greater perspective. The same is true for understanding of ideas, where even if you grasp a majority understanding in your immediate conception, you need to provide yourself with time for the unseen implications of your thoughts to come to you. It is very tempting to ‘think you’ve got it,’ and then proceed on the assumption that your ‘most of it’ understanding is sufficient for accurate judgment. It is also worth keeping in mind we have a tendency to overestimate the range of our own knowledge, in our own musings and when compared to others; we have a bias towards claiming certainty. This certainty often serves to remove the sense of openness from a conversation or dialogue, and increases hostilities, rather than understanding. On another note, one of the hallmarks of true scientific thinking is the willingness to always change your thesis in light of new evidence. Our rush to certainty often leads us to disregard potential evidence that could impact our perspective if we were to be open to letting it, and the longer we hold perspectives with such high degrees of certainty, the deeper they become ingrained into us, becoming blocks to our further growth. It requires a great deal of practice to develop the skill to use this kind of patience with our own knowledge.
Understanding – a prolonged absence of immediate judgment, criticism, or threat allows the other to relax their guard, which is something that most people have spent developing since their formative years – it can take a while to come down.ย Once it is down, a higher quality understanding is able to be developed, through open dialogue and the natural ebbs and flows of conversation / interaction.ย In this sense, understanding is like a mineral in ore; when we are clouded by our preconceptions, and the other is obfuscated through the guard or defenses they maintain, we have relatively low-grade understanding; we require much ore (iterative conversation/interaction) to produce relatively little mineral.ย When we get past our limiting beliefs (preconceptions), and have developed enough trust with the other to reduce their guard, we are able to achieve much deeper levels of understanding through significantly less iteration, and come to understand things or people as they are to be understood based on their essence, or a wider base of understanding of their character, as opposed to what you or they would have yourself understand. Understanding typically comes with a lot of nuance, but some of the highest-grade wisdom is often distilled into simple sentences.
Acceptance – the required end-result of understanding.ย ย You may not like what you have come to understand, but you need to accept, rather than deny, it on a fundamental level before you are able to work with it. Acceptance of the reality of the working situation is always the first step towards being able to affect change. We have all seen people living in denial; how it ends up becoming a circular enclosure that they live their life within, completely cutoff from things that fall outside of the comfort of their worldview, unable or unwilling to re-question basic assumptions required for personal growth and change. When you cannot accept as true what you have come to understand, you either need to invest more effort into patience and grow your understanding of the given person, thing or situation further, or closely scrutinize your preconceptions for flaws, which often can go hand in hand with developing or summoning the patience required for a more-than surface level of understanding. Acceptance is the fundamental requirement to work with any situation you encounter; otherwise you are working or struggling more with your preconceptions. Smiling at what makes you uncomfortable, be it feelings, persons or things, can be a good first step, as opposed to shying away out of aversion. It helps calm the feedback loop that leads towards denial and ignorance. Know that you do not need to internalize something to accept and work with it; acceptance does not come with a requirement to follow.
A conversational best practice during points of contention is to reiterate the statements someone makes to you in a way that reflects your understanding of what they meant, which provides validation for the other person, typically deescalating tension and allowing for greater ease of a conversational reframe / move towards compromise. This practice encourages the use of the principle of charity – where you provide the most reasonable context possible to another’s idea, and tends to diminish the use of straw-men arguments, which are its opposite. If you are able to do this with ease, without any impulse to misrepresent the position of the other, it is likely you have sufficient ability to accept. An aversion to being able to properly represent another’s position for fear of undermining our own ego tends to be an indicator of insufficient acceptance. It starts as a form of protection mechanism, but ultimately becomes an isolating one. It is difficult to assess this condition in ourselves, but many of us seem to be keenly aware of it in others. More patience with them, more patience with us, not just jumping to our first impression and running with it, being sure to take time to look for ways in which another’s understanding may be right, are all ways to maintain healthy levels of acceptance.
Appreciation –ย naturally arises with and after acceptance. Similar to a developed taste, as we become more adept at the practice, we are able to identify and appreciate individual elements of our experience, which can serve to provide greater nuance of understanding and depth of insight. This can be akin to finding the yin within the yang, so to speak; appreciating the silver-lining in the negative experience, or the parts of it that lead to further growth and maturation of your self, or maintaining some kind of baseline during the joyful experience, in order to avoid having your perspective get carried away – this comes with having a healthy appreciation for a given situation. One point of clarity – you have understanding of something, you have appreciation for it. It is an attitude that you bring to the table, the willingness to appreciate. It is you reaching out and extending yourself to it, to another. This is an amazingly human act, and works to make situations even more malleable. It is a very validating experience, to be appreciated. Our ability to appreciate is our hallmark feature, and is what has and will continue to set the tone for human progress, both individual and societal. Our lack of ability to appreciate is what defines and perpetuates the majority of conflicts in the world today; either an inability to identify them with us, or a generalized lack of regard for the humanity of the other. Israel and Palestine, Nazis and Jews, Christians and Muslims, Serbs and Kosovars, First Nations and North Americans, rivals in the Sudan – all of these conflicts share this characteristic. Many of our global problems will be unable to be resolved until we replace a strategy of arms with a strategy of appreciation, which will, over time, shift us from a combative dynamic to a cooperative one. A lack of appreciation is the start of repression, and no system, whether social or mental, can function optimally while actively repressing its participants. Repression shows the error of our qualitative calculus; we should be working to minimize it. However, this is not something than can be effectively mandated from the top-down (but you often have to start somewhere). A problem like racism needs to be weeded out from the bottom up; seeding a healthy sense of appreciation is an important step. The progress made in civil rights has not happened because legislators wrote a law. It has happened because there is greater recognition in a majority of individuals in society that all of the varied elements of society deserve appreciation too, whether you are talking about women, blacks, gays, the Irish…whoever has represented the repressed in the past. There has been a fundamental increase in the ability to identify with each other as human, and a fundamental decrease in the amount of ‘us vs them’ distinguishing going on.
This section has been largely construed in societal terms, because our ability to cooperate is what will ultimately determine the fate of our species. There’s a reason for things like the ‘Overview effect.’ Fermi was on to something with his paradox… it is important to recognize that even though we are speaking in societal terms now, appreciation really occurs on an individual, moment-by-moment, situational basis. It is your ability to appreciate that person right now in this situation that will help progress things – the widest brush strokes are still composed of individual bristles. Being able to embody this quality, to model it for our friends and family, is a very practical and effective way to seed it throughout our greater society and culture, indeed, there is no other way for it be achieved. There is a common idea that you are a rough average of the five people you spend the most time with. Often, this is used to position the understanding of the importance of surrounding yourself with high-quality people, however the converse understanding of this statement is equally important – you are constantly influencing the people you spend time with. Are you helping them make progress or holding them back, based on the perspectives and behaviours you are modelling for them?
This is a very important question for individual practice and development. Being honest with ourselves here is fundamental to making a positive impact – there is no shame in identifying behaviours you could work on doing differently; growing up in a consumer-driven society, surrounded by advertising and messaging that is mostly geared towards us considering ourselves first and foremost, we are bound to pick up many ego-centric tendencies…the sign of being well-practiced is how quickly we can see through and get past these behaviours. As a brief aside: the easiest way to convince someone to buy something is to make them feel psychologically uncertain – that they are lacking in some regard – manufacturing needs which then the market can fulfill. This is not always the case, but certainly with cars, beer, cigarettes, snack food etc. All of these industries care more about their profits than the psychological well-being of the people they sell to, and so will seek to understand the psychology in order to undermine it in order to sell – this was best practicing in advertising for many years, still is in many circles.
Identifying where we fall short is the first step to identifying what we can do to be better – self-improvement starts with honest self-acknowledgement. All it takes to be well-balanced is patience, understanding, acceptance and appreciation. If you can model this approach with yourself and others, you will find increasingly that no situation is unworkable, you will increase your effectiveness and act as a source of well-being for both yourself and those invest your time with.